Transcript

1.
A Personal History of Hypertext
A list of readings, online and on the page
Paul Kahn, January 2010
Vannevar Bush
Quotations from
“As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private
file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A
memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and
communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with
exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his
memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it
is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting
translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading.
There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an
ordinary desk.
[…]
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and
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2.
there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions
of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The
patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to
every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions,
strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly
through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the
pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an
organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory,
with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical
and chemical behavior.
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a
skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time
contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch.
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of
establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The
inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record,
but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.
• Computer Pioneers: Bush biography and photographs
http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/bush.htm
http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/gallery/bush.htm
• Internet Pioneers Biography
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html
• online French translation (partial): Tel que nous pourrions penser
http://www.archipress.org/episteme/vannevar.htm
• Memex animation (for Mac or Windows) on the Kahn+Associates web site
http://www.kahnplus.com/publication/fr/online.htm
• Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush by Erin Malone,
Boxes and Arrows
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/foreseeing_the_future_the_leg
acy_of_vannevar_bush.php
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3.
Ted Nelson
Quotations from “Literary Machines 93.1”
At your screen of tomorrow you will have access to all the world’s published
work: all the books, all the magazines, all the photographs, the recordings,
the movies. (And to new kinds of publications, created especially for the
interactive screen.)
You will be able to bring any published work to your screen, or any part of a
published work.
You will be able to make links – comments, personal notes, or other
connections – between places in documents, and leave them there for others
(as well as yourself) to follow later. You may even publish these links.
Royalty to each publisher will be automatic, as materials are delivered over
the network. Each piece delivered will be paid for automatically, from the
user’s account to the publisher’s account, when the user receives the piece
sent for.
Any document may quote another, because the quoted part is brought – and
bought – from the original at the instant of request, with automatic royalty
payment and credit to the originator.
• Literary Machines 93.1, Mindful Press, Sausalito CA, 1992
• Computer Lib / Dream Machines, Microsoft Press, 1987 (1974)
• Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents,
Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use , in ACM
Computing Surveys 31(4), December 1999,
http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html
• TransLiterature In Brief, in NEW Magazine 1_2005, September 2005,
http://www.new-mag.com/PDF/Translit_In_Brief.pdf
• Current teaching and lectures
Ted Nelson Homepage
Author's Website at the University of Oxford
http://ted.hyperland.com/
• Xanadu Project
http://www.xanadu.net/
• Xanadu Australia
http://www.xanadu.com.au/
• Project Xanadu
Article on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
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5.
Douglas Engelbart
Quotations from “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”
By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man
to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his
particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in
this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid
comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful
degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex,
speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to
problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we
include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists,
life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem
situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of
isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life
in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the
human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts,
streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-
powered electronic aids.
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report
AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air
Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo
Park, Ca., October 1962.
• Bootstrap Institute web site, Engelbart’s organization today
http://www.bootstrap.org
• NLS Demo, December 9, 1968 on MouseSite, Stanford University
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
• NLS Demo on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-
8734787622017763097&q=engelbart#
• Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of
Personal Computing, Thierry Bardini, Standford University Press, 2000.
• Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
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7.
Alan Kay
Quotations from “Personal Dynamic Media”
Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable
package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough
power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for
later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference mterials, poems,
letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms,
dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.
We envision a device as small and portable as possible which could both take in
and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory
systems. Visual output should be, at the least, of higher quality than what can be
obtained from newsprint. Audio output should adhere to similar high-fidelity
standards.
There should be no discernible pause between cause and effect. One of the
metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical
instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instandly
and consistently to its owner’s wishes. Imagine the absurdity of a one-second
delay between blowing a note and hearing it!
These civilized desires for flexibility, resolution, and response lead to the
conclusion that a user of dymamic personal medium needs several hundred times
as much power as the average adult typically enjoys from timeshared computing.
This means that we should either build a new resource several hundred times the
capacity of current machines and share it (very difficult and expensive), or we
should investigate the possibility of giving each person his own powerful machine.
We choose the second approach.
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